14 March 2013

Android Tablets to Overtake iPad in Market Share

Android Devices Set to Overtake iPad in Market Share
New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO — Shipments of tablets running the Google Android operating system will overtake the iPad this year for the first time, the research firm IDC has predicted, as Apple cedes more mobile market share to hard-charging rivals around the globe.

ZDNet
While Google originally touted the Chromebook as a laptop platform that wasn't based around specs, recent models have been upping the spec ante like good-ol' Windows notebooks (most notably the luxe Google Chromebook Pixel). Though still keeping ...
ZDNet

Neanderthals' large eyes 'caused their demise'
BBC News
The eyes have it: The Neanderthal skull (L) has larger eye sockets compared with a modern human skull (R). Consequently, the now extinct species used more of its brain to process visual information. Continue reading the main story ...
BBC News

Google Glass: Everything You Need to Know
PC Magazine
We're just coming up on the one-year point since its unveiling, so it's a great time to summarize everything we know about Google Glass; here are the key facts. Jamie Lendino...

Netflix Adds Social Options, Facebook Ties for U.S. Users
Bloomberg
Netflix Inc. (NFLX), the online video service, began offering U.S. subscribers the ability to peer into each others' digital movie libraries in a long-awaited partnership with Facebook Inc. (FB). The software, updating features offered to non-U.S. customers since ...

Microsoft reports Outlook, Hotmail services have display issues
Washington Post
Microsoft said Wednesday that its Hotmail and Outlook services were experiencing problems that may prevent users from seeing all of their messages. The company first posted messages about the outage on Tuesday night, though it has yet to provide ...

Samsung Galaxy S4 confirmed for UK mobile networks
ZDNet
The next device in the Galaxy range, expected to be the Samsung Galaxy S4, will be supported by the UK's mobile operators when it's announced on Thursday. Three, Orange, T-Mobile and EE have all confirmed they will be offering the device. EE, which is ...

In Alicia Keys' Debut As Z10 Ambassador, Where's the Z10?
Wall Street Journal (blog)
When Research In Motion Ltd. launched its BlackBerry Z10 smartphone in January, most of the details about the phone had already been announced or leaked online. The only real surprise was the announcement–and on-stage appearance–of the singer ...

Every SECOND there are EIGHT more Seagate drives in the world
Register
Seagate boasts that it has shipped a billion drives in just four years after taking nearly three decades to build its previous billion. The company shipped its first billionth disk in 2008; its inaugural product, the 5MB ST-506, hit the market in 1980. Now Seagate's ...

Google to pay laughably minuscule fine over Wi-Fi slurp across US
Register
Google has reached a peanut-sized $7m settlement with 38 US states, after its controversial Street View prowl cars deliberately collected payload data including emails and passwords from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks across America. The company said in a ...

Ouya Will Launch Without Community Features
Escapist Magazine
The Android-powered cube won't support chat, friend lists or achievements until later this year. Ouya backers can expect to receive the console that they invested in all those months ago within a couple of weeks, although they may find that they won't be able ...

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 dips its tow in the microtransaction pool
Digital Trends
Electronic Arts has been laying the ground work for the future of video game sales for years. Head all the way back to 2009's Madden NFL 10 and you can see the process at work: Madden Ultimate Team mode slapped microtransactions right into the middle...
Digital Trends

Brown Dwarfs Star System, WISE 1049-5319, Is Just 6.5 Light-Years Away
Huffington Post
When NASA launched the WISE satellite in 2009, astronomers hoped it would be able to spot loads of cool, dim objects known as brown dwarfs. Bigger than a planet, a brown dwarf is not quite a star, either—it is too small to sustain the nuclear fusion reactions ...

Life on ancient Mars? What you need to know
Fox News
Mars was capable of supporting microbial life in the distant past, scientists announced Tuesday. They reached this conclusion after studying the latest observations from NASA's Curiosity rover, which just analyzed the first-ever sample collected from the ...

Netflix publishes ISP speed index to let consumers compare providers
Digital Trends
Covered in detail by the official Netflix blog this week, the streaming video company launched a new page on the company site that lists Internet service providers along with the average speed of each service for the previous month. Netflix started tracking this ...
Digital Trends

Apple's iWatch Will Measure More than Time
Bloomberg
Have you recently noticed all the journalistic detective work about the watch that Apple is developing? Using unnamed company sources, patent filing analysis, and other sleuthing methods, technology writers have sketched a number of hypotheses about the ...

Photos : Pan-STARRS Comet
San Jose Mercury News media center
Photos of the Pan-STARRS Comet. The Pan-Starrs Comet is one of several “naked eye” comets expected this year during what some have dubbed the “Year of the Comet”. Close. March 12,2013. Los Angeles CA. Comet PANSTARRS i scene of the western ...

A Telescope that Sees the Beginning of Time to Open in Chile
Nature World News
(Photo : REUTERS/Ivan Alvarado ) Parabolic antennas of the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimetre/Submillimetre Array) project are seen at the El Llano de Chajnantor in the Atacama desert, some 1730 km (1074 miles) north of Santiago and 5000 metres above...
Nature World News

Microsoft Offers Students Free Office 365 & 20GB SkyDrive Storage
ValueWalk
If you've got an .EDU email address, then the good news is that you can get six months of free subscription to Microsoft Office 365, plus an additional 20GB of free SkyDrive storage space. For those who don't know, Office 365 University is a subscription for ...
ValueWalk

Google Now for iOS video leaks, gets yanked from YouTube
Fiercemobilecontent
A video indicating Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) will expand its Now personal assistant service to Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) iOS surfaced briefly Tuesday on YouTube before disappearing from the site soon after, Engadget reports. Google Now, launched in ...

Red Tide Algae Bloom Kills Record Number of Manatee
AccuWeather.com
A red tide algae bloom that has spread along the southwest Florida coast is killing 10 or more manatee a day. Amanda Cotton. The algae bloom occurs nearly annually along Florida's coast from Sarasota through the middle of Lee County. They are called red ...

Microsoft issues four critical updates for Patch Tuesday
Inquirer
SOFTWARE BUG FACTORY Microsoft has issued seven security bulletins across its software line in its Patch Tuesday release for March. The release comprises of four updates tagged with Microsoft's highest security rating of Critical, and three rated Important ...

Don't Believe the Hype: We Haven't Been Invaded by Space Algae
Motherboard (blog)
A picture of the fossilized diatom published in the team's January 2013 paper. via Journal of Cosmology. Finding extraterrestrial life has been NASA's main goal in planetary exploration for decades. Missions have been designed to follow known life-giving ...

'Pirate Bay' for 3D printing launched
BBC News
The company that developed 3D printed gun parts has announced plans to launch a new firm, dedicated to copyright-free blueprints for a range of 3D printable objects. Defcad, as the firm will be known, has already been dubbed the Pirate Bay of 3D printing.
BBC News

HTC One: Review of demand
Product Reviews
Since the HTC One was unveiled last month it has received a raft of buoyant reviews, with a great deal of excitement mounting around the Taiwanese manufacturer's new UltraPixel camera in particular. Today we wanted to review the HTC One demand at this ...
Product Reviews

Google Shopping hits your favorite gizmos
TG Daily
Google is bringing Google Shopping product listings to mobile devices. Google has been serving up product listings on desktop search results for quite a while, but now it is taking them to cramped mobile screens as well. A simple Google search on a phone ...

Amazon's play for Web names could test antitrust law
Thomson Reuters News & Insight
March 13 (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc may be setting the stage for a court battle and a test of antitrust law if it is allowed to go ahead with its plans to buy control of new Web address suffixes such as .book and .author. Publishers and authors have voiced ...

Colorado Student Receives $100000 Intel First Prize
New York Times
Colorado Student Receives $100,000 Intel First Prize. By ETHAN HAUSER. Published: March 12, 2013. A high school senior who cultivated populations of algae under her loft bed won first place and $100,000 in the Intel Science Talent Search on Tuesday ...

Watch: SpaceX 'Grasshopper' Reusable Rocket Breaks Record
PC Magazine
SpaceX this week showed off another milestone for its Grasshoppper vehicle, which reached heights of 24 stories during a recent test. On March 7, the Grasshopper launched successfully and hovered for about 34 seconds while 262.8 feet in the air.

Sony Xperia TL, Xperia J Getting Jelly Bean Treatment
PC Magazine
Two more devices are about the get a taste of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean — the Sony Xperia TL and Sony Xperia J. AT&T on Tuesday announced that Jelly Bean is now available for Xperia TL users, while Sprint said it has begun pushing out the upgrade for the ...

Sinkhole opens up in Washington and jaded humor emerges
Reuters
By Deborah Zabarenko. WASHINGTON | Tue Mar 12, 2013 7:31pm EDT. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Washington is used to being the brunt of jokes, particularly those centered around the action, or lack of it, on Capitol Hill. But on Tuesday, the focus moved to ...

1 in 4 teens use phones to access Web
USA TODAY
More young people have smart phones -- and they're often using those phones as the primary way they access the Web, according to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. How much should parents monitor? (March 13). Post to ...

Dropbox 2.0 brings functional drop-down menus to Mac and Windows
Ars Technica
Dropbox for Mac received an update to version 2.0 on Tuesday, bringing with it a number of UI upgrades to the desktop. The most noticeable difference is the revamped and prettified drop-down interface, which now allows you to accept or decline sharing ...

Smartphone accessory makes your car smarter, too
DVICE
With all the wearable gadgets being offered to measure the health of our bodies, it seems odd that there aren't more devices designed to monitor the health of the machines we use on a daily basis. The Automatic Link offers such a solution for car drivers, ...
DVICE

The Very Strange Story of Those Killer Dolphins
Slate Magazine (blog)
This morning, BoingBoing flagged a strange story out of the Ukraine: Military scientists in that country have been training dolphins to kill enemy divers (and also detect mines), and three of those killer dolphins have escaped. It's worth reading everything you ...
Slate Magazine (blog)